Eat Every Last Bite

That last mouthful you leave on your plate costs so much more than you think, says Justin Smith. Just a few small changes in your kitchen can make a massive difference to both your budget and the planet

- Justin Smith

 My journey to trying to manage food waste started with wild dogs. Really, wild dogs! When I was a young kid, a misty morning encounter in Zululand with a pack of wild dogs turned me into a nature lover for life. As I got older, I gradually figured out that becoming a game ranger was not very practical and that I didn’t have the stomach to be a vet. But there were other ways I could make a difference, so my passion for environmental and social issues led me to more than 15 years of managing sustainability programmes at big corporates, and most recently to a dream position at WWF-South Africa.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learnt has been around the imbalances in the food system, resulting in around a third of all food produced globally (and in South Africa) being wasted somewhere along its journey from farm to plate. This is largely caused either by inefficiencies in global supply chains, or by people wasting food they have bought. All this while so many face hunger every day. We are actually producing enough food to feed everyone on the planet into the foreseeable future – if we could just make sure that every